Another character for the word “rice plant” in Old Chinese

Masaki Nohara

doi:10.1017/S0041977X24000132

Another character for the word “rice plant” in Old Chinese

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2024

Masaki Nohara

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Masaki Nohara*: Affiliation:
Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
*: Email: noharam@zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp

Article contents

Abstract
Introduction
The character nǎo in the Liye Qin Slips
稻 “Rice or rice plant” in Old Chinese and Hmong-Mien
Conclusion
Footnotes
References

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Abstract

Two kinds of grain, “millet, 粟米 sùmǐ” and “husked rice, 稻 dào”, frequently appear in the Liye Qin Slips. Aside from these grains, another character seen in the Liye Qin Slips, nǎo, is thought to represent grain. It also represents the words for “brain, 腦 nǎo” in other excavated documents. Since the archaeological data show that rice cultivation was practised around the middle and lower Yangtze Valley, the homeland of Proto-Hmong Mien (formerly the state of Chu 楚地), the word for “rice plant, 稻 dào” seems to be a loanword from Proto-Hmong Mien *mbləu. The character nǎo is reconstructed as *nˤuʔ, which bears the same onset as the sound for “rice plant (or husked rice)” in North and East Hmongic languages nɯ (< *mbləu). Hence, we propose that the assimilation (*mbl- > *n-) in these languages could have occurred at the latest just before or after the Qin dynasty.

Keywords

Old Chinese Excavated documents Liye Qin Slips Hmong-Mien Proto-Min Rice plant

Information

Type: Article
Information: Bulletin of SOAS , Volume 87 , Issue 2 , June 2024 , pp. 345 - 356

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0041977X24000132 [Opens in a new window]
Copyright: Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of SOAS University of London

1. Introduction

In July 2002, more than 37,000 bamboo and wooden slips were found in the old well in Liye Gucheng 里耶古城 in Longshan County 龍山, Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture 湘西土家族苗族自治州, Hunan Province 湖南省 (see Figure 1).Footnote ¹

Figure 1.

Liye Gucheng 里耶古城

These slips belong to the so-called Qin Slips 秦簡 and are known as the Liye Qin Slips 里耶秦簡 (Liye Qinjian). They cover a wide range of topics, including legal documents, the administration of the commandery 郡 jùn, and the grain supply system before and after the Qin dynasty.Footnote ² According to philologists who have studied the Liye Qin Slips, since Liye used to be within the state of Chu 楚地, some slips reflect the influence of the writing system of the Chu State in the Warring States period.Footnote ³ Regarding the scribes of the Liye Qin Slips, there must have been several writers.Footnote ⁴

The Liye Qin Slips include references to several kinds of grain, including 粟米 sùmǐ “millet”, 稻 dào “rice (or rice plant)”, 需(糯)米 nuòmǐ “glutinous rice”, 秫 shù “glutinous millet”, and 麥 mài “wheat”. Note that among these grains, 粟米 sùmǐ “millet” appears most frequently, followed by 稻 dào “rice (or rice plant)”.Footnote ⁵ Other grains only appear a few times in the Liye Qin Slips. This distribution indicates that “millet” and “rice” were the main staples in the Liye district. Although the character 稻 dào refers to the rice plant in Classical Chinese texts, Chen Wei (Reference Chen2012: 30) noted that 稻 dào means “unhusked rice 稻穀”, while Huang Haobo (Reference Huang2015: 126) regarded it as “husked rice 稻米” based on the study of the conversion rate of 稻 dào in the Liye Qin Slips,Footnote ⁶ and this latter interpretation appears to be most likely.

Aside from these four types of grain, there are other characters representing grain: nǎo and nǎo. These characters appear once with a record of the amount on the slips (see Table 1).

Table 1.

nǎo and nǎo in the Liye Qin Slips

The purpose of this article is to trace the history of the character nǎo and discuss the word for “rice” in Old Chinese (hereafter OC) and Hmongic before and after the Qin dynasty. As mentioned, “millet” and “rice” appear most frequently in the Liye Qin Slips, so the character nǎo probably represents one of them.

The following sections will mainly focus on the character nǎo and related characters seen in the Liye Qin Slips and seek to determine what the character nǎo represents.

2. The character nǎo in the Liye Qin Slips

2.1. The characters nǎo and nǎo

The characters nǎo and nǎo each appear once on the Liye Qin Slips; see (1) and (2) in Table 1.

The two figures in (1) and (2) were converted into the modern characters nǎo and nǎo, which are composed of 匕 bǐ, 止 zhǐ, and 山 shān (the latter is composed of 止 zhǐ and 山 shān). It is generally agreed that these two characters are variants of the characters 匘 nǎo and nǎo.

According to the annotator of the Liye Qin Slips, the character 匘 nǎo should be read as the word “glutinous rice, 稬 nuò” by phonetic loan, as the word 稬 nuò means “rice (or rice plant), 稻 dào” in the Pei state 沛國; therefore, the character 匘 nǎo here might represent the word “rice, 稻 dào”.Footnote ⁷

However, the characters 匘 nǎo and 稬 nuò are not interchangeable by phonetic loan. 匘 nǎo came from *-u (or *-aw) in OC, and 稬 nuò descended from *-or (or *-oj). Therefore, it is unlikely that the character 匘 nǎo represents the word 稬 nuò “glutinous rice” here; see Table 2.Footnote ⁸

Table 2.

Reconstruction compared: 匘 nǎo, 稬 nuò, and 稻 dào

While 匘 nǎo and 稻 dào bear the same vowel *-uʔ with the same tone category, they do have different initials *n- and *l-. For this reason, 匘 nǎo in the Liye Qin Slips does not represent the word “rice, 稻 dào” directly.Footnote ⁹

In addition, since the character 稻 dào itself appears in the Liye Qin Slips, it does not seem that 匘 nǎo and 稻 dào represent the same word, as seen in Table 3.

Table 3.

稻 dào in the Liye Qin Slips

It is possible that 稻 dào is a standard form for “rice”, while 匘 nǎo is a substratum form (local languages).

In what follows, we will examine related characters to confirm the reconstructed form of (匘) nǎo.

2.2. Related characters in other excavated documents

In addition to the Liye Qin Slips, related texts with (匘) nǎo appeared in other excavated documents (see Table 4).

Table 4.

Related characters

As seen in Table 4, the characters nǎo and nǎo represent the word for “brain, 腦 nǎo” in (3), (4), and (5).Footnote ¹¹ The character in (6) represents the word for 柔 rǒu, meaning “supple, soft, and flexible”. As 柔 rǒu unambiguously came from OC *nuʔ according to rhyme evidence,Footnote ¹² is *nuʔ (or *nˤuʔ) as well. As discussed below (§2.3), the bottom part of the character , which is , is the phonetic element. Note that the character nǎo is considered a variant of (see §2.3 for details). Based on these phonetic loans, the character nǎo and 腦 nǎo simultaneously can be reconstructed as *nˤuʔ in OC.Footnote ¹³ See the reconstructed form in Table 5.

Table 5.

The reconstructions compared: 柔, 腦, and ()

2.3. The development of the character (匘) nǎo and its phonetic element

In addition to the Liye Qin Slips, Chen Jian (Reference Chen2008/2019) provided another document that records a character related to nǎo in the Western Zhou Bronze scripts (dated at the latest to the late Western Zhou);Footnote ¹⁵ see Figure 2 and Table 6.

Figure 2.

Liang Ji Guan 梁姬罐 (Tomb M2012 of Guo State 虢国墓地 M2012)

Table 6.

The character in the late Western Zhou bronze scripts

The character in (7) is composed of the elements 米 mǐ, 艸 cǎo, and 刀 dāo. The original annotator of Liang Ji Guan pointed out that the right-hand element of the character (艸 cǎo and 刀 dāo) is a pictograph meaning the act of “cutting the grass with a knife”.Footnote ¹⁶ Notably, Chen Jian (Reference Chen2008/2019: 97–105) presented a hypothesis that the character in (7) is an antecedent of the character nǎo. The transformation of the shape from to 腦 nǎo is summarized in Table 7.

Table 7.

The transformation of the character 腦 nǎo

The middle part of the character in (8) has transformed to in (9) and to in (10), (11), and (12). These characters seem to have been transformed to 止 zhǐ or 山 shān in the Qin and the early Han dynasties. Finally, the character nǎo is transformed to , as shown in (13); see Table 8.

Table 8.

The development of the parts of nǎo

In addition, the characters 刀 dāo in (8) and (9) are replaced by 匕 bǐ in (11) and (12); see Table 9.

Table 9.

The change from 刀 dāo to 匕 bǐ

Since the characters nǎo and nǎo almost always represent the word for “brain”, the semantic unit “肉 (月)” might have been added instead of “匕” as in (13).

As seen in the contexts in (1) and (2), it is generally agreed that nǎo represents a kind of grain; however, what kind of grain it stands for precisely remains unclear. The shapes of the characters might be key to determining their evolution. The character nǎo was regarded as a pictograph meaning the act of “cutting the grass with a knife”. If true, the character nǎo might originally have represented the word “cutting the rice plant” or the noun “rice plant” and then changed so that it could also represent “husked rice” and “unhusked rice” at the latest shortly before or after the Qin dynasty.

In contrast, the components of the character 稻 dào, as Sagart (Reference Sagart2011: 128) has argued, have the meaning of “dehusked rice grains out of the mortar”.Footnote ²² Compare the characters shown in Table 10.

Table 10.

nǎo and 稻 dào

According to the components, the former probably initially meant “rice plant” and the latter “husked rice (or its process)”. The character 稻 dào initially referred to “husked rice” and changed so that it could also represent “rice plant” at a later stage.

Table 11.

Semantic changes

In section 3, we examine the word “稻 dào” in OC and the Hmong-Mien languages (hereafter HM).

3. 稻 “Rice or rice plant” in Old Chinese and Hmong-Mien

3.1. 稻 Dào in OC

稻 Dào is reconstructed as *[l]ˤuʔ based on the rhyme evidence in the texts of the Shījīng and Xiéshēng connections.Footnote ²³

Previous studies considered the Chinese word for “rice (or rice plant), 稻 dào” to be a loan word from HM. For example, Haudricourt and Strecker (Reference Haudricourt and Strecker1991: 335–41) expected that agricultural words were borrowed from HM and that “husked rice” was one of them.Footnote ²⁵ Haudricourt and Strecker regard these words as HM substrata in Chinese. Ratliff (Reference Ratliff2018: 131–2) adduced three reasons why rice is regarded as a loan from HM into Chinese: (1) “… the archeological record shows that rice cultivation occurred in the south before it was known to the ancient Chinese,Footnote ²⁶ who cultivated millet, and that the ancestors of the Hmong-Mien people were in the right location to have been the first rice cultivators”;Footnote ²⁷ (2) “… there is no evidence of an initial nasal in Old Chinese”; and (3) “… the word does not appear in Tibeto-Burman”. There is no internal evidence for rice (or rice plant) to reconstruct the prenasalized obstruent in Chinese. Hence, it is highly probable that the Chinese language adopted the word “rice (or rice plant)” from Proto-HM.Footnote ²⁸ However, the tone is irregular; the OC Shǎngshēng (rising tone) tone typically corresponds to Tone B in HM.Footnote ²⁹

Table 12 shows the “rice plant” data for Hmongic languages.Footnote ³⁰ As demonstrated, the proto-form of onsets for “rice plant” is reconstructed as *mbl- based on the data.Footnote ³¹

Table 12.

“Rice plant” data in Hmongic, from Ratliff Reference Ratliff2010: 48Footnote ³²

If “rice (or rice plant), 稻 dào” is a loanword from HM, it is assumed that the prenasalized obstruent was dropped and simplified to *[l]ˤ- when the ancient Chinese people borrowed it (*mbl- > *[l]ˤ-).

Notably, the word for “rice plant” in Proto-Min (hereafter P-Min) is reconstructed as *diu^tone2 粙. P-Min Tone 2 corresponds with OC Shǎngshēng, with no problem with tonal correspondences. The problem is that the P-Min form has a semivowel -i-, whereas the MC 稻 dào belongs to division 1, which does not reflect -i-. The semivowel -i- in Min might have come from *dl- within certain stages of P-HM as follows: *mbl- > *ndl- > *dl- > *dj- (P-Min *diu^tone2).Footnote ³³ The semivowel *-i- indicates that P-Min might have borrowed the word “rice plant” from a different stratum with OC and that the word for “rice (rice plant)” was borrowed from HM.

3.2. The distribution of “rice plant” among the Hmongic languages

The data from Table 12 are converted into Figure 3. This map shows minimal data only.Footnote ³⁴

Figure 3.

“Rice plant” in Hmongic

In the southern parts (places 4 and 6), prenasalized clusters remain (*mbl- > mpl-), while in East Hmongic and North Hmongic (places 1 and 2), the dental nasal *n- appears more often (*mbl- > n-).Footnote ³⁵ In addition to these data, other dialects have a prenasalized dental obstruent, such as ndl- and ntl-.Footnote ³⁶ These data show that *mbl- had assimilated to ndl- and ntl- before the lateral *-l-.

3.3. Nǎo in the Liye Qin Slips and “rice plant” in North Hmongic languages

In a fascinating detail, no. 0 in Figure 3 indicates the location of Liye Gucheng where the Liye Qin Slips were unearthed. It is obviously near no. 2 “Jiwei 吉衛 (North Hmongic)” with the dental nasal *n- for onsets. The straight-line distance between Liye Gucheng and Jiwei is only 50 km. Most of the data from the North Hmongic subgroups have the nasal n- for unhusked rice (or rice plants), as shown in Table 13.

Table 13.

Data from North Hmongic: unhusked riceFootnote ³⁷

Figure 4 shows the distribution of the data from North Hmongic (no. 0 indicates the location of Liye Gucheng).

Figure 4.

Rice in North Hmongic

As mentioned in §2 above, the characters nǎo and nǎo are reconstructed as *nˤuʔ, and this intriguingly coincides with Jiwei [nɯ²], Yangmeng [nɯ³¹], and Zhongxin [nɯ³⁵]. Hence, it is assumed that the character nǎo in the Liye Qin Slips represents the same word as “rice or rice plant” in these languages. Although it is difficult to determine whose word it was originally, if this assumption holds, we can deduce that OC borrowed at least two varieties of “rice plant”: *mbləu in P-HM (or P-Hmongic) and *nəu in “Proto-North Hmongic (provisional) or certain groups of North and East Hmongic speakers”.Footnote ³⁸ The former dropped *mb- when the Chinese borrowed it; the latter is a substratum word, and the word itself was lost in the ancestor of Middle Chinese and modern Chinese dialects (when the character nǎo became used for the word “brain 腦 nǎo” instead), as shown in Table 14.

Table 14.

The direction of loanwords: OC

As mentioned above, the P-Min “rice plant” is reconstructed as *diu^tone2. This could have come from the different HM dialects with OC, as shown in Table 15.

Table 15.

The direction of loanwords: P-Min “rice plant”

Since the characters nǎo and nǎo, which initially referred to “rice or rice plant”, represent the word for “brain, 腦 nǎo” bearing the onset *nˤ- in the Qin Slips and the Mawangdui silk manuscript, we can estimate that the assimilation (*mbl- > *n-) must have taken place at the latest sometime before or after the Qin dynasty (approximately 200 K) in East and North Hmongic. Proto-Hmong-Mien might be even older.Footnote ³⁹

4. Conclusion

Two kinds of grain, “millet, 粟米 sùmǐ” and “husked rice, 稻 dào”, appear most frequently in the Liye Qin Slips. In addition to these grains, another character is seen in the Liye Qin Slips: nǎo. It represents the words for “brain, 腦 nǎo” and “supple, 柔 rǒu” in other excavated documents. Since 柔 rǒu is reconstructed as *nˤuʔ based on the rhyme data, both 腦 nǎo and nǎo are thought to have had the same sound at the time.

The archaeological data suggest that rice cultivation occurred around the middle and lower Yangtze Valley, the homeland of Proto-HM (formerly the state of Chu 楚地). The word “rice or rice plant, 稻 dào” seems to be a loanword from HM into OC, and the “rice plant” proto-form in Hmongic is reconstructed as *mbləu (OC *lˤuʔ).

What interests us is that the proto-form of nǎo, which is *nˤuʔ, bears the same onset as the sound of “rice plant” in North and East Hmongic (n- < *mbləu). It is assumed that OC *nˤuʔ () probably cognates with the word [nɯ] in these languages, and it represents the word “rice or rice plant” in the Liye Qin Slips.Footnote ⁴⁰ Hence, we estimate that the assimilation (*mbl- > *n-) in certain groups of North and East Hmongic must have taken place at the latest just before or after the Qin dynasty (approximately 200 bce).Footnote ⁴¹

Footnotes

¹ The Liye Gucheng is thought to have been first built in the state of Chu during the late Warring States period. The slips are dated from the twenty-fifth year of King Zheng of Qin (222 bce) to the second year of the Second Emperor (208 bce); see Hunan Sheng Wenwu Kaogu Yanjiusuo 湖南省文物考古研究所 (Reference Kaogu Yanjiusuo2012).

² There are two types of slips regarding grain: “grain-supply slips 出稟記錄簡” and “grain-lending slips 出借記錄簡”. See Huang Haobo Reference Huang2015: 117–39 and Miyake Reference Miyake2018: 51–85.

³ See Hunan Sheng Wenwu Kaogu Yanjiusuo 湖南省文物考古研究所 Reference Kaogu Yanjiusuo2006: 179; and Reference Kaogu Yanjiusuo2012: 1.

⁴ There are some slips with the name of writers; for example, “感手 Gan wrote” (Liye 8-1540).

⁵ Although we regard 粟米 sùmǐ as “millet” in this paper, what the characters 粟米 sùmǐ actually represent is still unknown. 粟米 Sùmǐ in classical texts is a general term for grain. Chugoku kosannsho Kennkyuukai 中國古算書研究會 (Reference Kennkyuukai2016: 74–5), however, regarded 粟米 sùmǐ in the Zhangjiashan Han Slips 張家山漢簡 as “unhusked millet”.

⁶ Notably, Huang Haobo (Reference Huang2015: 117–39) pointed out that rice tends to have been provided to officials and bondservant infants (Lìchén Yīng'ér 隸臣嬰兒), while “millet” was supplied to other enslaved people or servants. In addition, see texts with the character 稻 dào in the Statutes on Granaries 35–6 倉律 in the Shuìhùdì Qin Slips 睡虎地秦簡: as rice ripens after grain, rice is to be accounted for the next year. When the harvest is finished, the figures are to be reported, distinguishing between non-glutinous rice plants and glutinous rice plants (稻後禾孰(熟)，計稻後年。已獲上數，別粲(秈)穤(糯)秙(黏)稻). Additionally, see Hulsewé Reference Hulsewé1985: 40.

⁷ See Chen Wei (Reference Chen2012: 238). 校注：“匘，原釋文作”。此字與秦漢簡帛中數見，即“匘”，通作“腦”。簡文中爲穀物名，疑當讀爲 “稬”（腦、稬爲泥毋雙聲字）。説文 “稬，沛國謂稻曰稬。從禾，耎聲。”《集韵⋅換韵》“稬，或作糯。” In addition, Guo Pu 郭璞 annotated that 稻 dào is called 稌 tú in Pei state in Éryǎ 爾雅.

⁸ As for the relationships between 稬 nuò “glutinous rice” and 稻 dào “rice plant”, Xu Shen 許慎 in his famous dictionary Shuōwén Jiězì 說文解字, composed in the Han dynasty, included an annotation that 稻 dào is called 稬 nuò in the Pei state 沛國 as is mentioned above. Based on the study of OC phonology, however, 稻 dào cannot be read as 稬 nuò through phonetic loan; it might be read based on a semantic loan (e.g. 訓讀, 同義換讀). The word for 稻 dào descended from OC *-u; see the reconstructed form in Table 2.

⁹ There might be another possibility of a Chinese internal development of *lˤuʔ > *nˤuʔ in the Chu dialect, but we do not have a parallel development in OC at present. In this case, we cannot explain why P-Min *diu^tone2 has a semivowel *-i-, see Table 15.

¹⁰ Shuihudi: 睡虎地秦簡《封診式》, 57 號簡, Guodian: 郭店楚簡《六德》, 31–33 號簡, Mawangdui: 馬王堆《五十二病方》, 247, 432.

¹¹ There is a character seen in the Zhouli 周禮 Kaogongji 考工記, Gongren 弓人, which is annotated as “: 乃老反, 本又作腦. The Fan-qie spelling is nojX-lawX. It is written as 腦 nǎo in other texts”. (Jingdian Shiwen 經典釋文).

¹² 柔 rǒu rhymes with 憂 yōu, 求 qiú, 劉 liú, and 休 xiū in the Shijing 詩經.

¹³ The word for “brain, 腦” belongs to the -aw group 豪韻 in Middle Chinese (hereafter MC). Since the MC -aw group should have descended from both *-u and *-aw, it had been unclear to which OC rhyme group 腦 nǎo and (匘) nǎo belong.

¹⁴ The Liang Ji Guan was unearthed in the Tomb M2012 of Guo State, but its origin is still unknown. It might have come from the Liang State 梁國.

¹⁵ See Liu Shegang Reference Liu2002: 61.

¹⁶ Henan sheng Wenwu Kaogu Yanjiusuo 河南省文物考古研究所 (Reference Kaogu Yanjiusuo and Wenwu Gongzuodui1999: 312): “象以刀斷草”.

¹⁷ Guodian Chu Slips 郭店楚簡 Liude 六德 31–33.

¹⁸ Shuihudi Qin Slips 睡虎地秦簡 Fengzhenshi 封診式 57.

¹⁹ Liye Qin Slips 里耶秦簡 8-860.

²⁰ Mawangdui 馬王堆帛書 Yangshengfang 養生方 66.

²¹ Dunhuang Han Slips 敦煌漢簡 667.

²² The phonetic 舀 yǎo is a verb meaning “to scoop husked grain out of the mortar”.

²³ 稻 dào rhymes with 早 zǎo, 酒 jiǔ, and 壽 shòu bearing OC *-u in the Bīnfēng Qīyuè 豳風七月. It is composed of a semantic component 禾 hé and phonetic component 舀 yǎo, which belongs to y- 以母 in MC.

²⁴ This bronze ware is estimated to date to the late Western Zhou.

²⁵ Baxter also considered the possibility that 稻 dào is a loanword from HM (quoted in Haudricourt and Strecker Reference Haudricourt and Strecker1991: 339).

²⁶ Another study suggests that the earliest rice cultivation occurred in Henan; see Deng, Qin and Gao Reference Deng, Qin and Gao2015.

²⁷ See Bellwood Reference Bellwood, Sagart, Blench and Sanchez-Mazas2005: 90: “… the HM family is the one most likely to have originated closest to the central Yangzi early rice zone”. Additionally, see Sagart, Blench and Sanchez-Mazas (Reference Sagart, Blench and Sanchez-Mazas2005: 2–3) and van Driem (Reference Driem and Enfield2012).

²⁸ Nevertheless, whether Chinese or Hmong-Mien is the donor language has been a controversial issue (see Sagart Reference Sagart1999: 181–2; Reference Sagart2011: 128). Sagart concluded that Chinese is the donor language based on the study of semantics.

²⁹ The same problems are seen in other words such as “egg”; OC Shǎngshēng: P-HM tone C.

³⁰ Some of the data in Hmongic do not distinguish “rice grain” and “rice plant”. In most Mienic languages, the onsets are bl- and bj-.

³¹ Ostapirat (Reference Ostapirat2014: 350) reconstructed it as *m.l-.

³² 1: East Hmongic (Qiandong 黔東) Yanghao 養蒿 (Kaili County, Guizhou); 2: North Hmongic (Xiangxi 湘西) Jiwei 吉衛 (Huayuan County, Hunan); 3: West Hmongic (Chuanqiandian) White Hmong (Laos and Thailand); 4: West Hmongic (Chuanqiandian 川黔滇) Zongdi 宗地 (Ziyun County, Guizhou); 5: West Hmongic (Chuanqiandian) Fuyuan 复員 (Fuyuan County, Yunnan); 6: Hmongic Jiongnai 長垌 (Jinxiu County, Guangxi); 7: Hmongic Pa-Hng 巴哼 (Rongshui County, Guangxi).

³³ The sound change from *-l- to *-i- in the word for “rice plant” is also seen in both Hmongic and Mienic dialects; see Ratliff Reference Ratliff2010: 48.

³⁴ For a more detailed map, please refer to Taguchi Reference Taguchi, Mitsuaki, Makoyto, Satoko, Hiroyuki and Keita2021. Taguchi (Reference Taguchi, Mitsuaki, Makoyto, Satoko, Hiroyuki and Keita2021: 70) classifies the forms cognate with the proto-form *mbləu into six types: A-1 mple, A-2 blau, A-3 plau, A-4 mjo, A-5 ndli, A-6 nɯ.

³⁵ Chen Qiguang (Reference Chen2012: 640) noted that the labial initial m- also appears in 小章 (Xiangxi, Luxi, Hunan) mɯ³¹; also see Yang Zaibiao (Reference Zaibiao2004: 278) mɯ²¹.

³⁶ 石門坎 (Chuanqiandian, Weining, Guizhou) ndli²⁴, 梅珠 (Bunu, Du'an, Guangxi) ntle¹²; see Li Yunbing Reference Li2018: 295.

³⁷ The data from Yang Zaibiao (Reference Zaibiao2004: 278). N1: Jiwei 吉衛 (Huayuan county 花垣縣), N2: Yangmeng 陽孟 (Jishou city 吉首市), N3: Zhongxin 中心 (Baojing county 保靖縣), N4: Xiaozhang 小章 (Luxi county 瀘溪縣), N5: Danqing 丹青 (Jishou city 吉首市), N6: Dengshang 蹬上 (Longshan county 龍山縣).

³⁸ As Table 13 shows, a labial initial m- appears in Xiaozhang, and the P-North Hmongic might not have been a simple *n-. We still do not know what Proto-North Hmongic looked like. Further studies are needed.

³⁹ The Proto-Hmong-Mien homeland was thought to be in the middle and lower Yangzi Valley (coinciding with the state of Chu 楚). Sagart et al. (Reference Sagart, Blench and Sanchez-Mazas2005: 2–3) date Proto-Hmong-Mien to approximately 2500 BP. The phonetic is descended from the character in the Liang Ji Guan, which was cast in the Western Zhou period (approximately 800 bce). Therefore, the assimilation (*mbl- > *n-) might have taken place much earlier.

⁴⁰ In the official documents of the Liye Qin Slips, the character 稻 dào is officially used to refer to “rice or rice plant”, the substratum word *nˤuʔ () just happened to appear only twice in the Liye Qin Slips.

⁴¹ Considering the major split between Hmongic and Mienic, the assumed time (200 bce) might be slightly early. Baxter and Sagart (Reference Baxter and Sagart2014: 246) estimate the borrowing time to be before the Wei-Jin period (third century) based on the rhyme evidence (note that they regard OC as the donor in this case). However, Baxter and Sagart (Reference Baxter and Sagart2014) cautioned that this is only a rough estimate.

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